A shared Outlook inbox lets customers reach the whole sales team, but it does not tell your reps who is handling each RFQ. Two people can start the same quote while another request waits for an engineering answer nobody follows up on.
A Bourne quoting workspace can give each request an owner, prepare its draft and keep later replies attached to the same job. This guide follows that process through a changed customer request, then covers the Microsoft 365 connection your administrator needs to set up.
Group the conversation under one customer request
A single commercial request can span multiple messages. Record the source messages, attachments and buyer reference, then give the RFQ its own identifier and revision.
Microsoft’s message resource documents message properties, attachments and conversation information. Use those records as evidence. Do not use the subject line alone as the unique key for quote creation; unrelated requests can share a subject.
For incremental intake, Graph’s message delta query works within a mail folder. Keep the returned continuation and delta links and account for each folder you track.
Show reps what changed
Consider an example request for 30 control units. The customer later adds: “Only 20 for the first shipment; the other ten can follow. Use our new site address.”
The reviewer needs the revised split, the new ship-to and the effect on availability or freight. The agent should not overwrite the requested quantity with 20 or silently use the account’s default address. In Business Central, that means checking customer and delivery fields as well as item lines before converting the quote.
Present the source beside each unresolved decision. An old discount in quote history explains the customer’s reference, but the reviewer must check whether the agreement still applies.
Show whether the quote is waiting, approved or sent
Use a small set of explicit states: received, needs clarification, ready for review, approved and sent. Record an owner for any state that requires a person. An email folder can help reps navigate, but keep the business state with the RFQ so a manual folder move does not lose the work.
After approval, record the ERP quote identifier and the outgoing message result. In an AI workflow connected to NetSuite, the estimate integration must confirm the saved record before the sending step uses it. A failed email should remain a send failure, not trigger another ERP quote. The quote response should identify the released revision and its exceptions so the buyer knows exactly which offer to accept.
Confirm how the shared mailbox will connect
Microsoft Graph supports shared and delegated mail-folder access. Delegated Mail.Read.Shared and Mail.ReadWrite.Shared permissions can read or write shared messages, but Microsoft says they do not support change-notification subscriptions for those folders. Its documentation identifies application Mail.Read for that notification scenario. Have your administrator choose the appropriate access model and mailbox scope.
Do not treat “it connects to Outlook” as a complete deployment specification. Confirm whether the connection relies on a signed-in user and how it continues when that person leaves or loses access.
Measure the time customers actually wait
Track elapsed time from receipt to the first useful reply, and active minutes spent preparing and reviewing the quote. An automatic acknowledgment is not a completed response if the buyer still waits for an answer.
Include open requests in the pilot evaluation, especially work waiting for engineering or purchasing. Otherwise, a report of completed quotes can hide the queue’s hardest cases.
The Lean Enterprise Institute’s value-stream mapping method follows both material and information flow. Apply that distinction to the inbox: record when the rep starts work, when they ask engineering a question, when engineering answers and when the customer receives the offer.
Suppose preparation takes 25 minutes but the quote waits two days for a specification decision. Removing ten minutes of typing helps capacity; it barely changes the customer’s wait. A stronger Outlook workflow sends engineering a complete question, assigns an owner and resumes preparation when the answer arrives. Measure that waiting interval separately so you can see whether the deployment improves the real delay.
Use Bourne to prepare and coordinate the RFQs in your inbox
Choose Bourne when your sales team needs to coordinate item research and technical answers as well as prepare the quote. We can build a quoting queue with a clear owner for each request, source-linked drafts and a route for engineering or pricing questions. A later customer email can become a revision to the existing request rather than a second job.
Keep Outlook for customer correspondence and use Bourne to handle the work behind it. Bring us your shared-inbox process.
Frequently asked questions
Can an agent work from a shared Outlook inbox?
Yes, Microsoft Graph supports shared and delegated mail access. The required permissions depend on how the app signs in and whether it needs notifications. Validate that arrangement with the Microsoft 365 administrator.
Can we keep humans approving every quote?
Yes. Stop the workflow at a review state and keep sending behind a separate approval action. Test this with an intentionally incomplete RFQ to confirm that the system cannot send it by taking an alternate path.
Will moving an email create a duplicate quote?
It should not if the workflow records source identity and its own RFQ identifier. Test moves, repeated notifications and a full resynchronization before launch. Matching only on subjects or folder position is insufficient.
Can the same workflow use SharePoint technical documents?
Yes. Use Bourne’s native SharePoint integration and grant it access to the approved document library. Mail access does not automatically grant document access. Include revision control and the technical reviewer in the manufacturing workflow.
Further reading
Lean Enterprise Institute: value-stream mapping
Mapping material and information flows from order to delivery.
Arda Bulut
Arda Bulut is the co-founder and CTO of Bourne and HockeyStack. He leads engineering at Bourne, building the platform people use to create AI products, agents and automations.